Big thanks to Brenda of Queens, N.Y., for the smart, snappy and complimentary 5-star review of 30 Days a Black Man that she wrote for LibraryThing, the cataloging and social networking site for book lovers. Brenda, aka “Bookish 59,” has read and reviewed hundreds of books. If they’re half as good as the she wrote…

It’s not possible to overstate the importance to libertarians of Richard Rothstein’s shocking The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. It’s a great book and a damning indictment of the abuse of federal, state and local government power by racist politicians, housing policy-makers, urban planners, interstate highway designers and…

It’s easy to understand why Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart really digs New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. Despite whatever political muck Landrieu’s had to step in to climb out of the cesspool of Louisiana politics, he has impressed everyone as a wise, decent and principled man when it comes to dealing with race and black-white…

Once again, for the dozenth time in my lifetime, the New York Times parachutes in and writes about Pittsburgh in a lame, biased, sloppy way. Not only did the article erroneously talk about the Strip District being a place where steel mills once flourished, it also did its usual hate-job on Uber by under-mentioning the…

Economics is not as difficult to understand as politicians, the main stream media or too many Econ 101 profs make it out to be. Every day for more than a decade at his web site Cafe Hayek Donald Boudreaux has provided coherent and valuable proof that basic principles like supply and demand — and more…

Pittsburgh and its people have pioneered a lot of important stuff over the years. Industrialism and post-industrialism are its major historical innovations. The city’s fortunes — and population — rose and fell precipitously with the rise and fall of manufacturing and steel from the late 1800s until the 1960s, when the heavy industries that once…

The smart young man — Scott Beyer of http://bigcitysparkplug.com/ — who wrote the smack-on critique of my pal Richard Florida’s new book The New Urban Crisis for Forbes — is coming to Pittsburgh next year. His visit will be part of his 30-city project to study the incredibly stupid things that have been done by…

In the Jim Crow South, the system of segregation was, as we’ve been told for half a century, de jure — established and enforced by law. In the North, racial segregation, we were told, was de facto segregation — a result of private, uncoordinated choices made by individuals and institutions. In 30 Days a Black…

My old friend Dan Splain, behind whom I sat for six years in alphabetically fixated Catholic school in the southern suburbs of Pittsburgh, took the photo while bound for Tahiti, a place I think I have heard of. It’s a hopeful sign that the book is being noticed. I hope it was in the LA…

in 1999 when I interviewed anti-drug-war warrior Ethan Nadelmann for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette he was optimistic about reforming America’s hideous drug laws when he really had no right to be. In 2009 when I interviewed Nadelmann about America’s war on drugs and the prospects of the government losing it, things were looking rosier for the…